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Transfer to another account: Incompatible Dates
I have a current account and a PayPal account.
For receipt of invoice payments this works fine. However I've noticed a major issue when trying to account for a purchase / debit which involves an account transfer. It seems that making a "transfer" explanation from one account to another when the dates do not match that incorrect duplicate entries are formed.
I made a purchase from my PayPal account which caused a payment to be withdrawn from my current account. This would not normally be a problem, since I can explain the money out of the current account as a transfer to the PayPal account.
However, the current account lists the transfer as the 20th February whilst PayPal show the transfer as the 18th February. This means that whenever I try to explain the entry in PayPal as a "transfer", a duplicate entry is created in the current account. Whenever I try to explain the entry in the current account as a "transfer" the PayPal account then receives a duplicate. I assume this is because FreeAgent attempts to match the transfer as the item of the same value on the same date. This is a problem as PayPal and current account disagree on what the date of the transfer was by two days.
I have tried to explain the transfer in the current account and then to force the date to change from the 20th to the 18th and then to delete the official entry - the official entries cannot be removed (this is good in a way). If the official entry is abused (by me messing with the import file) then when I make the transfer explanation in the current account page, the PayPal account will, for a couple of days, be reporting a negative balance - which is wrong.
Please can I have some advice on this? Should I work around this bug by using a manual explanation of some form - and what category of explanation should I be using?
Many thanks in advance for your help. This is an excellent product that makes this type of book keeping much easier than it would be to do manually.
Warm Regards,
Mike
For receipt of invoice payments this works fine. However I've noticed a major issue when trying to account for a purchase / debit which involves an account transfer. It seems that making a "transfer" explanation from one account to another when the dates do not match that incorrect duplicate entries are formed.
I made a purchase from my PayPal account which caused a payment to be withdrawn from my current account. This would not normally be a problem, since I can explain the money out of the current account as a transfer to the PayPal account.
However, the current account lists the transfer as the 20th February whilst PayPal show the transfer as the 18th February. This means that whenever I try to explain the entry in PayPal as a "transfer", a duplicate entry is created in the current account. Whenever I try to explain the entry in the current account as a "transfer" the PayPal account then receives a duplicate. I assume this is because FreeAgent attempts to match the transfer as the item of the same value on the same date. This is a problem as PayPal and current account disagree on what the date of the transfer was by two days.
I have tried to explain the transfer in the current account and then to force the date to change from the 20th to the 18th and then to delete the official entry - the official entries cannot be removed (this is good in a way). If the official entry is abused (by me messing with the import file) then when I make the transfer explanation in the current account page, the PayPal account will, for a couple of days, be reporting a negative balance - which is wrong.
Please can I have some advice on this? Should I work around this bug by using a manual explanation of some form - and what category of explanation should I be using?
Many thanks in advance for your help. This is an excellent product that makes this type of book keeping much easier than it would be to do manually.
Warm Regards,
Mike
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Mike,
FreeAgent looks for matching transfers in the other account up to 7 days later (the credit later than the debit, of course) and automatically match them up.
Are you saying the credit occurred before the debit? If so, we could probably slacken off the rules here to allow for that case? If not, we need to review our code and tests to ensure this is being handled correctly.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Mike,
FreeAgent looks for matching transfers in the other account up to 7 days later (the credit later than the debit, of course) and automatically match them up.
Are you saying the credit occurred before the debit? If so, we could probably slacken off the rules here to allow for that case? If not, we need to review our code and tests to ensure this is being handled correctly.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Ed,
The credit happened before the debit, yes. Effectively what happens is that when an item is purchased via PayPal, PayPal immediately factor the invoice and make the payment on behalf of the current account. The current account then takes two or three days to pass the funds to PayPal. Therefore the PayPal credit is shown as the 18th while the current account debit is shown as the 20th.
I hope this helps.
Hope also that the API documentation is coming alone well :)
Mike
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Inappropriate?Mike,
OK, we'll allow a 2-day 'factoring' window in this case. One reason we didn't want to do this initially is obviously it opens up the possibility of mixing up similar transfers between accounts on consecutive days, but maybe we'll solve that one as and when someone actually has that problem!
This'll be a week or two before it can be done. If you can email me the precise details of the transactions we can manually 'tidy things up' at our end...
1 person says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Hi Ed,
That's great. Maybe that will be the easiest fix although it might also be worth providing a manual means to match up the payments. I'm not sure if this would be of use to any of your other customers, however. Who knows?
No rush, I'll wait for the week or two as it allows me to test the fix that way.
Cheers,
Mike
I’m cheerful
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Inappropriate?@Ed,
I have this as well - except the credit into the Paypal account occurs seven days in advance of the debit from the current account!
I’m wishing all my accounts did this so I could earn interest twice
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